What Is and Might Be and then Otherwise, David Miller (Knives Forks & Spoons Press)
This is principally a book of conversations and juxtapositions where the gaps and pauses and what is between are as significant as the links and lines and flow. Sight and sound are juxtaposed; what is said being as meaningful as what is seen in silence. Dreams, memories, images, stories, phone calls, conversations are all recounted, reimagined, remembered and re-membered in an attempt to commune with the dead and navigate grief.
David Miller is an artist, musician, poet and writer of paradox who is concerned with both the seen and unseen, the heard and unheard, what is separated and what is held together. He has “worked across genres throughout his career, challenging conventional boundaries between poetry, short story, life writing and essay”, as Matt Martin once noted. He’s doing more of the same with this collection which features paintings alongside poetry, prose poetry and story writing. When I interviewed him in 2023, he said that the various activities he’d been involved in over many years “are not unrelated” but “just how they are related cannot be seen, even by me, unless they’re presented together”. This collection, then, presents an opportunity to see how they relate.
His writings provide hints of his methods:
- “In lucidity – / out of obscurity / and back again -” (Bridport Notes)
- “you don’t tell me anything / by speech – / only by disclosure / as the oracle provided signs.” (Death)
- “ambience does not have dominance over choice; any more than the eye has dominance over the ear … or, for that matter, vice versa.” (For an Artist)
- “‘… Relativism only makes sense when the relative is put in relation to the Absolute. Otherwise, all is nonsense.’ / ‘Yet how? Variously; yes. Pluralistic? And in ways we can only Understand in terms of approach.’ / ‘Or manifestation … reflection … however partial or distorted …’ ” (A Phone Call)
- “reflections & non-reflections / I / sometimes / & sometimes not / & nothing comes to nothing / in some way otherwise” (the squirrels have gone now)
From these hints we can see the truth of statements he made in our interview to the effect that “art and music are, by their very nature, beyond language” so that, even if we try to describe and explain them through language, that is always inadequate. As a result, he believes “in trying to see and realise what goes beyond language” through visual thinking and musical thinking.
This attempt is about “stretching or extending the possibilities available to one, or if you like, challenging what was considered possible in many quarters”. It is an attempt that is practised through “interrelation, symbiosis and overlap”, the intersection of categories – prose and poetry, poetry and sound, writing and drawing to name only a few of the fertile zones explored here. It is also a constitutionally collaborative endeavour as the engaged reader/viewer is involved in exploring/re-imagining/reflecting on/filling in/puzzling out the pauses, joins, and juxtapositions in poetry, prose and paintings.
This method also coinheres beautifully with his primary subject matter. Most of the material here was created after the death of his wife Dodo (the philosopher Doreen Maitre) in 2022, and much of it explicitly or implicitly involves mourning as well as reflection and contemplation in the wake of that loss. It is in the nature of grief that, although broad stages of grief can be identified, it impacts each of us differently at different times. The identification of stages of grief can deceive us into thinking that grief is a process that can be completed, when the reality is that our loss never leaves us although our responses to it may change over time.
Miller’s reflections on the experience of loss are compelling:
- “a tower / for two / thus for more / than I. / Now.” (Bridport Notes)
- “black field / that can only be black.” (Our House)
- “Birds in jars / die. / Released –” (The Logos)
- “– Thunder, lightning and rain / drove me back down the mountain / yet again. I / cleave as I may in grief.” (Death)
In an echo of his title and his method, he reflects that:
“There is no closure –
only what’s beyond closure.” (Closure)
.
Jonathan Evens